# Flipping Coins Source: https://www.artforum.com/columns/mitchell-f-chan-zantar-games-technology-kevin-buist-1234736627 Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Flipping-Coins?index=0x69092108e8b087ea589ee1ed07f8eb3674c877ff783adae0b35f246fab4411e1bfe29fde Submitted by misha on 2025-11-03 UTC, 3 upvotes, 0 comments ## Summary Kevin Buist describes Mitchell F. Chan's "Zantar" video game series, shown in the exhibition "Insert Coin(s)" at Nguyen Wahed in New York, as a parable about the false promises of crypto. The series includes Zantar, Overture, Moonboi and Ladyboss, which explore the blurring of play and work and how these boundaries create winners and losers. In Zantar, the camera slowly zooms out until the playable game shrinks into a tiny screen, mirroring Michael Snow's 1967 film Wavelength and reflecting the erosion of player choice. Chan plans to release the series on Steam under the title "Zantar and Other Stories." ## Article Mitchell F. Chan, Ladyboss, 2025, video game. From “Zantar and Other Stories,” 2025. ON A WARM SPRING DAY in May, I traveled to Nguyen Wahed, a small art gallery in New York’s East Village, to play a board game about colonialism in Afghanistan. I was joined by a handful of fellow art-world game nerds at the invitation of Toronto-based artist Mitchell F. Chan, whose exhibition “Insert Coin(s)” was on display during New York Frieze week. It’s become something of a tradition for Chan to host board game sessions and pickup basketball games around art events in lieu of the typical dinners and parties. This time, the game was Pax Pamir: Second Edition (2019), an hours-long strategy game by renowned designer Cole Wehrle, in which players compete to influence the nineteenth-century battle between Britain and Russia for control of Afghanistan, which was then known as “The Great Game.” The dense, political board game was a considered choice by Chan—an artist whose previous works, from conceptual NFT projects to video games, have explored the dark corners of history, finance, and the contemporary attention economy. I had visited Nguyen Wahed the day before to experience the new series of video games featured in “Insert Coin(s).” All of the works are games about games in the sense that they refer to one another, providing information about the narrative world they share. They’re also games about games more broadly, as they explore the cultural and economic power of the game industry and the psychological power of games over players. These works also deal with the dangers of the pump-and-dump fervor that animates the crypto industry, which increasingly is echoed in global finance more broadly. The exhibition, like the games, revolved around a playable version of a fictional video game called Zantar, a retro 2D action game in which the player controls a gelatinous cube named Zantar that devours pixelated villagers. While playing Zantar, the player earns a fictional cryptocurrency called BeBeCoin, which—in the narrative presented by the games—is accepted by e-commerce retailers from eBay to OnlyFans. Taken together, the “Zantar” series sketches out an imagined world much like our own, but in which Zantar is as popular as Fortnite or Minecraft. Mitchell F. Chan, Zantar, 2025, video game. From “Zantar and Other Stories,” 2025. The other games in the series take Zantar and its imagined cultural impact as their subject. Overture is a simple game with several randomized variants in which a series of subtitles are paired with floating 3D game objects. Players can only click through the subtitles as they encounter one of several texts that precede the release of Zantar, including a press release about the game, an internal company argument about branded lunch pails, the transcript of a tech podcast promoting Zantar’s release, and other snippets. The cumulative effect of these text fragments is to reveal the financially predatory nature of the game and the questionable ethics of the fictional company that produces it, BeBeSoft. The remaining games in the series are Moonboi and Ladyboss, both endless-runner style games in which an avatar constantly moves forward on a fixed 3D track while the player can only move their avatar from side to side to collect items and power-ups, with no choice but to keep racing forward. In Ladyboss, a voice-over narration tells the story of a famous Zantar streamer named sallymOOn4u who built a career donning sexy outfits selected by her fans and grinding for BeBeCoins. The game approximates her shifting fortunes, which are affected by fading fan interest and the eventual downturn of the BeBeCoin market. The endless-runner game format becomes a metaphor for spreading precarity and the desperate need to produce new content to satisfy the attention economy. Mitchell F. Chan, Zantar, 2025, video game. From “Zantar and Other Stories,” 2025. Sitting on a comfortable couch in the show (which also included prints and sculptures relating to the games), I started playing Zantar on a huge LED screen, settling into the simple, Pac-Man-like monotony of the game. After a few minutes of play, a narrator with a heavy Canadian accent (voiced by Chan himself) began speaking, noting “there’s HOPE now that Zantar is here.” This was jarring, as during the voice-over, I was directing Zantar (the gelatinous cube character in the game) to eat villagers—but it quickly became clear that the narrator was talking not about the character but rather the game itself: In his small village in northern Canada, he and other young residents had jobs playing Zantar all day, mining BeBeCoins for their boss. As he explained this, the “camera” of the game’s point of view slowly zoomed out, and the game I was playing became framed within a virtual screen itself situated within a low-poly 3D environment. In front of the virtual screen was the narrator, holding a controller just like mine. As the zoom continued pulling out, I saw a room full of other computers and other Zantar players. The narrator explained that he recently had been working extra hours, banking personal surplus BeBeCoins in an effort to set up his own coin-mining operation. The virtual camera’s point of view continued to widen, eventually showing the exterior of the building. Through a window, I could still see the Zantar game I was playing, though it was getting smaller and smaller. I watched as the narrator took a smoke break outside with his manager, who revealed that some distant boss was demanding that the cost of the extra electricity the narrator used while playing the game after hours be docked from his wallet of BeBeCoins. In the same instant, my own BeBeCoin total, visible in the corner of my screen—which had been ticking up with each villager I ate—plunged into negative territory. The narrator’s dreams of financial emancipation were crushed, as the shot continued to pull out to show the whole arctic village: a meager collection of shacks in the tundra, populated by BeBeCoin miners and (according to the voice-over) “tweakers.” During my visit, Chan explained that Zantar formally references and reverses the slow zoom of his fellow Canadian Michael Snow, whose 1967 experimental film Wavelength consists of a single shot in the artist’s studio that slowly zooms in across the room. Colored gels are intermittently placed over the lens; some people move a shelf; a man enters the scene and promptly collapses to the floor; critic Amy Taubin enters and makes a phone call, during which she expresses concern about the body on the ground. By the end of the forty-five-minute film, the image on the screen is only a tight crop on a photograph of ocean waves. Eventually we realize that the picture has been pinned to the wall at the center of the frame the entire time, but there is no particular point when this becomes apparent to every audience member; rather, each viewer has their own moment of realization. Chan achieves a similar trick in Zantar. As the virtual camera slowly zoomed out and the narrated story became more compelling, I gradually lost interest in controlling the gelatinous cube on the diminishing screen; eventually, the figures got so small that playing became impossible. The result was a slow transformation from game to movie, mimicking Wavelength’s gradual transformation from movie to photograph.* Unlike Wavelength, however, the transition suggested the erosion of choice, as my active participation gave way to passive perception; though I started the game as a player, I ended it as a mere bystander. Mitchell F. Chan, Zantar, 2025, video game. From “Zantar and Other Stories,” 2025. Just as Snow’s work offers a meditation on the falsities of photographic representation, Zantar is a parable about the false promises of crypto. Alongside the never-ending futility of Moonboi and Ladyboss and the ominous warnings of Overture, it forms a series focused on the blurring of play and work, the porousness between games and markets, and how the dissolution of these boundaries creates classes of winners and losers—topics that are far more serious and nuanced than what we usually expect from video games. Chatting with me on the couch in the gallery, Chan mentioned that the title and basic concept of Zantar came from a throwaway line in the 1992 film Wayne’s World. In a sponsorship meeting with the hotshot producer for Wayne and Garth’s quirky TV show, a corrupt arcade magnate explains that they have a new game called Zantar; the title character “is a gelatinous cube that eats warriors in a medieval village. Every time it eats a chieftain you ascend to a higher level. Beauty part is, you can’t get to the next level, so the kids keep coughing up quarters, ya know?” In the fictional world of Chan’s Zantar, the arcade owner’s avarice is one-upped by crypto gamification, which leads to poor rural communities being exploited by distant economic overlords. Of course, BeBeCoins are not real, and you cannot destroy your life in pursuit of them; but Chan’s games are real, and on July 16, the gallery announced (via X) that an NFT of Zantar had sold to a private collector for $300,000—which was followed by Chan’s announcement that he would be making the game available for anyone to play for free via his website (zantar.chan.gallery). In September, all of the “Zantar” gameswere presented by DE SARTHE in its booth at Frieze Seoul, and this month, the gallery will show Moonboi and Ladyboss at West Bund Art & Design in Shanghai. Concurrently, Chan plans to make Zantar, Overture, Moonboi, and Ladyboss available via Steam and other gaming platforms under the title Zantar and Other Stories. By selling the works as extremely limited NFTs and distributing them as playable mass-market games, Chan is able to capitalize on the rarity of digital proof-of-ownership, while staying true to the broad appeal of video games that is central to the work. Mitchell F. Chan, Overture, 2025, video game. From “Zantar and Other Stories,” 2025. The morning I spent playing board games in the gallery, I quickly learned that Chan was better than me at Pax Pamir. He conspired with gallery owner Mimi Nguyen to advance the cause of the British, while I scored zero points, resulting in a humiliating defeat for the Afghans. Talking about the game as we packed up the pieces, Chan seemed equally enthused about its meta, game-within-a-game design choices and its complicated historical ethics. Players of Pax Pamir do not assume the roles of the British, Russian, or Afghan empires directly. Instead, we controlled small tribes, each player deciding which empire we wanted to help or resist as a way of advancing our own goals. The “Zantar” series presents a similar meta-game. The imperial forces of crypto, addictive game design, and the attention economy are jockeying to decide our fate. We can play the game, but the agency we’re afforded is mostly an illusion. n Kevin Buist is an independent critic and curator based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. * In Wavelength, the soundtrack consists of a sine wave that mimics the camera’s zoom, slowly sliding from the lowest to the highest audible tone. Snow used the musical notation term glissando to describe this sound, indicating the gradual slide between a range of notes, often achieved by an instrument like a trombone. In a sense, Wavelength is a glissando between a movie and a photograph, and by extension, Zantar is a glissando between a game and a movie.